BOOK NEWS: First major critical survey of Australian poetry

 

The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry

Edited by Ann Vickery

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009470230

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/european-and-world-literature-general-interest/cambridge-companion-australian-poetry?format=HB

An invaluable resource for faculty and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.

Contents:

"Introduction" Ann Vickery

I. Change and Renewal

1. "Models of poet and nation" Philip Mead

2. "War, crisis and identity in Australian poetry" Dan Disney

3. "Cultivating Australian poetry through periodicals" John Hawke

II. Networks

4. "Above and below: sublime and gothic relations in nineteenth century Australian poetry" Michael Farrell

5. "Romanticism, sensibility, and colonial women poets" Katie Hansord

6. "Experiment and adaptation in Australia's modernist poetry" Aidan Coleman

7. "The postwar 'golden generation' (1945–1965)" Toby Davidson

8. "Generation of '68 and a culture of revolution" Corey Wakeling

III. Authors

9. "High delicate outline: the poetry of Judith Wright" Nicholas Birns

10. "Burning Sappho: Gwen Harwood's Incendiary verse" Ann-Marie Priest

11. "Les Murray: ancient and modern" David McCooey

12. "Lionel Fogarty's poetics of address and negative lyric" Dashiell Moore

IV. Embodied Poetics

13. "'The strength of us as women': A Poetics of relationality and reckoning" Natalie Harkin and Jeanine Leane

14. "'Country snarled/ in borders': spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetry" Kim Cheng Boey

15. "Australian poets in the countries of others'" Louis Klee

16. "Writing the Body" Orchid Tierney

17. "Not the poem: in media res" John Kinsella

V. Expanding Form

18. "Hybrid Forms: the verse novel, prose poetry, and poetic biographies" Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

19. "Electronic, visual and sound poetries in Australia" A. J. Carruthers

Ann Vickery is professor of writing and literature at Deakin University. She is the Author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000) and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics of Australian Women's Poetry ((2007)). She is also the co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys into Private Papers (with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman, 2009).